little MORE Human

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GRAYWOLF PRESS
New Titles & Selected Backlist
Winter 2017
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B o a r d o f D i r e c to r s
Carol Bemis (chair), Catherine Allan, Trish F. Anderson, Mary Ebert, Lee Freeman, Chris Galloway, James
Hoecker, Mark Jensen, Tom Joyce, Will Kaul, Chris Kirwan, Ann MacDonald, Jim McCarthy, Ed McConaghay,
Allie Pohlad, Cathy Polasky, Mary Polta, Paula Roe, Gail See, Roderic Southall, Judy Titcomb, Emily Anne
Tuttle, Melinda Ward
B oa r d E m e r i t u s
Marilynn Alcott, Ann Bitter, Page Knudsen Cowles, Sally Dixon, Colin Hamilton, Betsy Hannaford, Diane
Herman, Katherine Murphy, Mary Polta, Gail See, Kay Sexton, Margaret Telfer, Melinda Ward, John Wheelihan,
Margaret Wurtele N at i o n a l C o u n c i l
James Hoecker (chair), James Alcott, Marion Brown, Mary Carswell, Edwin C. Cohen, Nina Dodge, Ellen Flamm,
Vicki Ford, Paul Griffiths, Betsy Hannaford, Barbara Holmes, Georgia Murphy Johnson, Sheela Lampietti, Chris
LaVictoire Mahai, Kevin Martin, Maura Rainey McCormack, Zachary McMillan, Elise Paschen, Bruno A. Quinson,
Susan Ritz, Marita Rivero, Eunice Salton, Gail See, Stephanie Stebich, Kathryn B. Swintek, Kate Tabner, Nancy
Temple, Diane Thormodsgard, Joanne Von Blon, Tappan Wilder, Catherine Wyler
A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating
Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant
from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota.
Additional support has been provided by the Amazon Literary Partnership, the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen
Foundation, the College of Saint Benedict, the General Mills Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Lannan
Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Elizabeth C. Quinlan Foundation,
and Target.
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover photo: © Menna / Shutterstock.com
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“One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.”—Salt
Cinder
New and Selected Poems
SUSAn STE WArT
CINDER
New and Selected Poems
S U S A N S T E WA R T
Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the fi rst time poetry from across
Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new
poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with
formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of
childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt
perceptions, both acute and shared. Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one
of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.
to the Nth, like the truth of an ending
unskeined across the crust of the white field.
Though it happened only once, I
Poetry, 256 pages, 7 x 9
Hardcover, $25.00
February
978-1-55597-763-4
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
am sending the thought
of the thought
continuing.
To return to
the field before the mowing.
When a goldfinch swayed
on a blue stem stalk,
and the wind and the sun
stirred the hay.
—from “After the Mowing”
“The particular wonder that is Susan Stewart as both incisive poet and
path-breaking scholar manifests itself throughout this illuminating, at
moments incantatory, gathering. Her measures explore the world’s appearances, incidents, and accidents with care and acuity, teasing forth their
music and mysteries by means of a patient, yet relentless, and relentlessly
human, focus. ‘To see what is / in motion you must move.’ Read slowly.”
—Michael Palmer
SUSAN STEWART is
the author of five books
of poetry, including
Columbarium, winner of
the National Book Critics
Circle Award. A former
MacArthur Fellow and a
chancellor of the Academy of
American Poets, she teaches
at Princeton University.

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An E xcerpt from A L it tle More Human
He came to on the back of a horse. Weeping into his chest. The dreams he’d had, the man he was.
Where was the hurt today. The throb in his balls was disco. The throb in his head was science: a hangover in which he felt like hell. Believed in hell. And there in the sky: a bird, a plane, or just the drone of
his fantasy life taking flight.
It was nine a.m. in a park on Staten Island. The grass was splattered with light—first sun in days.
He was wearing a Dodger-blue spandex bodysuit with built-in utility belt and a nylon cape hitched to
his shoulders and mantled down his back. There was mud crawled up his legs and algae nooked in his
gauntlets, as if he’d humped a swamp.
He popped the goggles off his face. Tears that had welled in the troughs slipped down his cheeks.
Apparently, he’d been crying. He yanked at the fabric gathered around his groin. Something not right
down there. A little sore. Also, the thigh of his suit was ripped, and there was blood dried along the
seam and spotted down his leg.
He’d gone out last night and had arrived in the park by some means, possibly foot. But he couldn’t say
for sure. Actually, he couldn’t say at all. On the bright side, he had to be here, anyway, in a glade where a
banner flapped in the wind: Meet Brainstorm! He smiled a little. Not everyone had a weekend job as good
as his. He spurred the horse toward a crowd waiting for him. Brainstorm was the season’s box office hit.
And his persona had been in such demand, the stores weren’t all that rigorous about who they hired to
play him. Hence Phil, who’d been doing this work for six months, though work made it sound like an
obligation when it was more like a chance to be who he was in plain sight. Not some superhero but a guy
who could do things other guys could not.

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A dazzling new novel from the author of the
“weird, thrilling, and inimitable” Woke Up Lonely
(Marie Claire)
A Little More Human
A Novel
a
“Maazel writes with a kind of ecstatic
swagger — freewheeling and cocksure,
intelligent and loopy and funny as hell.”—Slate
little
o
MORE
Human
F io n a M aa z el
Meet Phil Snyder: new father, nursing assistant at a cutting-edge biotech
facility on Staten Island, and all-around decent guy. Trouble is, his life is
falling apart. His wife has betrayed him, his job involves experimental
surgeries with strange side effects, and his father is hiding early-onset
dementia. Phil also has a special talent he doesn’t want to publicize—
he’s a mind reader and moonlights as Brainstorm, a costumed superhero.
But when Phil wakes up from a blackout drunk and is confronted with photos that seem to show him assaulting an unknown woman, even superpowers won’t help him. Try as he might, Phil can’t remember that night, and
so, haunted by the need to know, he mind-reads his way through the lab
techs at work, adoring fans at Toy Polloi, and anyone else who gets in his
way, in an attempt to determine whether he’s capable of such violence.
A Little More Human, rife with layers of paranoia and conspiracy, questions how well we really know ourselves, showcasing Fiona Maazel at her
tragicomic, freewheeling best.
a novel
Fiona Maazel
Author of
Woke Up Lonely
Fiction, 304 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
April
978-1-55597-769-6
Ebook Available
Brit., 1st ser.: Graywolf Press
Audio: HighBridge Audio
Trans., dram.: Dunow, Carlson &
Lerner Literary Agency
ALSO AVAILABLE
Woke Up Lonely, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-672-9), $15.00
Praise for Woke Up Lonely
“Woke Up Lonely is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, filled with swerves
and contradictions. . . . Poignant and unpredictable.”
—Jane Ciabattari, NPR
“A deeply felt and wildly original novel that repays the attention it demands,
and once read won’t be soon forgotten.”
—Bookforum
FIONA MAAZEL is the
author of Woke Up Lonely
and Last Last Chance. She is
winner of the Bard Fiction
Prize and her work has
appeared or is forthcoming
in the New York Times Book
Review, Harper’s Magazine,
Ploughshares, and Tin House.
She lives in Brooklyn.

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An E xcerpt from Freebird
Ever since he was a child, Ben Singer had despised baseball. It was a game of zero hustle, no meaty
physical contact, no flame-engulfing accidents, no perilous flips, spins, or even dismounts, a sport of
millionaire morons dressed up in children’s costumes, spitting on their own shoes. Not to mention, the
food they served at the ballparks was disgusting. For upward of forty years he’d been making the case
against baseball one bar stool at a time, and it was only very recently that he’d begun to wonder if maybe
in this he’d been wrong, too.
Today, seated in the bleachers of his former high school, watching a brightly colored squadron of
young men arranged against a singular opposing batter in white jersey, Ben was forced to wonder if
maybe all his tirades against baseball had been wrongly conceived. Maybe all those baseball-loving
fuckheads had a point. On a sunny summer afternoon, the smell of cut grass and citrus mixing with the
smell of hot dogs and stale popcorn, the sounds of the kids yelling, the crack of the bat—baseball was
proving not all that bad, maybe even kind of great, a form of deep communion with the American grass
and earth itself.
...
A year ago he never would have been here. A year back, and two, and three, he would have been off at
war, fighting on the front lines of America’s campaign for freedom, guided still by the great truism that
had dictated his actions since he was fifteen years old, the single axiom he’d even deemed worthy of a
tattoo. Even now the words stretched across the taut curves of his deltoids, shoulder to shoulder, in
a plain, unadorned, antique typewriter font: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready
in the night to visit violence on those that would do us harm.” A year ago he’d had no reason to question
that truth, but like so many of his truths these days, it was under violent siege.

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A page-turning new novel from the author of
Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award
a novel
Freebird
A Novel
J O n r Ay M O n D
The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about
to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of
Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture
capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a
former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling
with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And
Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch
it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his
family’s moral character to the core.
Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed fi lms Meek’s Cutoff and
Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of
one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates
of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.
Jon Raymond
Fiction, 336 pages, 6 x 9
Hardcover, $26.00
January
978-1-55597-760-3
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.:
The Clegg Agency
Praise for Livability
“The lives of the folks in Jon Raymond’s Livability are clouded by longing
and lit with rare flashes of grace.”
—Vanity Fair
“Raymond is a prose maximalist. . . . [He creates] compulsive and fluent
interior monologuists, who experience their lives with articulate intensity.”
—The New York Review of Books
JON RAYMOND is the
author of two novels, Rain
Dragon and The Half-Life,
and the short-story collection Livability. His work has
appeared in Tin House, the
Village Voice, Bookforum, and
other places. He lives in
Portland, Oregon.

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“Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most daring
and entertaining writers in America today.”—Sam Lipsyte
Wait
Till You
See Me
Dance
Stories
DEB OLIN UNFERTH
Fiction, 144 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $15.00
March
978-1-55597-768-9
Ebook Available
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., 1st ser., dram.: McCormick
Literary
DEB OLIN UNFERTH is the
author of Minor Robberies,
Vacation, and Revolution:
The Year I Fell in Love and
Went to Join the War, which
was a finalist for a National
Book Critics Circle Award
in autobiography. She lives
in Austin, Texas.
“Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most daring and
entertaining writers in America today.”
—Sam Lipsyte
W a i t T i l l Yo u S e e M e D a n c e
Stories
D eb O li n U n fe r th
For more than ten years, Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly
askew, wickedly comic, cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta,
Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, NOON, and the Paris Review. Her stories
are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until
now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction. Wait
Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as
well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling “The
First Full Thought of Her Life,” a shooter gets in position while a young
girl climbs a sand dune. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to tell a
story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In “Stay Where
You Are,” two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by
a gunman they assume to be an insurgent—but the gunman has his own
problems. An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable
and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal,
in ter­r ifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that
have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories
often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is
reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George
Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory
that is entirely her own.
Praise for Deb Olin Unferth
“An encounter with Unferth’s prose is to be permanently, wondrously
afflicted by its genius.”
—Heidi Julavits
“The source of her stories’ allure is not obvious, yet they are alluring—you
feel them as deeply and definitely as glass splinters.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review

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The brilliant first novel in The Encircling Trilogy,
a searing psychological portrait of a
man by his friends
A Novel
Encircling
Encircling
A Novel
C a r l F r ode T ille r
T r a n slated f r om the No r wegia n b y
CARL
FRODE
TILLER
B a r ba r a J . H avela n d
Translated from the Norwegian by
Barbara J. Haveland
David has lost his memory. When he places a newspaper ad to ask his friends
and ­family to share their memories of him, three respond: Jon, his closest
friend; Silje, his teenage girlfriend; and Arvid, his estranged stepfather.
Their letters reveal David’s early life in the small town of Namsos, full of
teenage rebellion, the uncertainties of first love, and intense experiments
in art and music.
As the narrative circles ever closer to David, the letters interweave
with scenes from the present day, and it becomes less and less clear what to
believe. Jon’s and Silje’s adult lives have run aground on thwarted ambition
and failed intimacy, and Arvid has had a lonely struggle with cancer. Each
has suspect motives for writing, and soon a contradictory picture of David
emerges. Whose remembrance of him is right? Or do they all hold some
fragment of the truth?
Carl Frode Tiller’s masterful opening novel to The Encircling Trilogy
won the European Prize for Literature, the English PEN Award, and
the Hunger Prize. Encircling, with David as its brooding central enigma,
confronts the relativity of memory in an audacious and daring novel that
reveals the shape of a life and leaves us wanting more.
“Drills into human nature with sensibility, painful honesty and accurate
prose. A rare talent.”
—Jo Nesbø
“You could even dub Tiller the anti-Knausgaard. In place of the latter’s
heroic solipsism, his chorus of voices yields a prismatic, multi-faceted view
of personal identity.”
—The Independent (UK)
Fiction, 336 pages, 5¼ x 8
Paperback, $16.00
February
978-1-55597-762-7
Ebook Available
Brit: Sort of Books
1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., dram.: InkWell Management
A Lannan Translation Selection
CARL FRODE TILLER is the
author of five novels and four
plays. Books in The Encircling
Trilogy have won the Brage
Prize and the Norwegian
Critics Prize for Literature,
and have been translated into
multiple languages. He lives
in Trondheim, Norway.

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Winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award
of the Academy of American Poets,
selected by Carolyn Forché
Afterland
Poems
Mai Der Vang
AFTERLAND
POEMS
Poetry, 96 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback, $16.00
April
978-1-55597-770-2
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
MAI DE r VAnG
Afterland recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and
the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the
story of her own family and by doing so, she also provides an essential history
of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are
written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces
recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War, only to abandon them.
That history is little known, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now
living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of
extraordinary force, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and
lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken
by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.
When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what
the current gives. When we reach the camp,
there will be thousands like us.
If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads
and waiting pastures of America.
We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo
as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage
MAI DER VANG is an
editorial member of the
Hmong American Writers’
Circle and coeditor of How
Do I Begin: A Hmong American
Literary Anthology. Her essays
have appeared in the New York
Times, San Francisco Chronicle,
and the Washington Post.
for the sweetest mangoes.
I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep.
—from “Transmigration”
“Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud,
hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly
spiritual. Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the fl ight of the Hmong
people, and their survival. . . . Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.”
—Carolyn Forché

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The astonishing, powerful debut by the
winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award
WH ERE AS
WHEREAS
Poems
L Ay L I LO n G S O L D I E r
WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government
in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and
tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its
perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer
narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has
created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her
own writing, and her predicament inside national affi liations. “I am,” she
writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala
Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this
dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must
friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident,
plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
P O E M S L AY L I L O N G S O L D I E R
Poetry, 114 pages, 7 x 9
Paperback, $16.00
March
978-1-55597-767-2
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach
what it is to be Lakota therein the question: what did I know about
being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What
did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces?
Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn
together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to
share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands I watch her be in multiple musics.
—from “WHEREAS Statements”
“I was blown away by Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—inspired by its
trenchant, beautiful thinking about the relationship between political
speech and literature’s capacity to write back. And write back Long Soldier
does, with a sensibility so sure of itself that I fi nd myself simply standing
back in admiration.”
—Maggie Nelson
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER
received a 2015 Lannan
Fellowship for Poetry,
a 2015 National Artist
Fellowship from the
Native Arts and Cultures
Foundation, and a 2016
Whiting Writers’ Award.

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Ongoingness reads variously as
on, a celebration, an elegy.”
Review
arizably rewarding read.”
Brain Pickings
ocative.”—The Boston Globe
On Keeping a Notebook,’
cord but rather a meditation
g.”—Bookforum
together explore the problem
ntity.”—Los Angeles Times
ess has a line that knocks the
The Portland Mercury
D iary
“[Manguso] has written the
memoir we didn’t realize we needed.”
—The New Yorker
Ongoingness
The End of
a Diary
Ongoingness
The End of a Diary
Sarah Manguso
“[Manguso] has managed to transcribe
an entirely interior world. She has written the
memoir we didn’t realize we needed.”
—The New Yorker
Nonfiction, 104 pages, 5 x 7½
Paperback, $14.00
February
978-1-55597-765-8
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., dram.: Janklow and
Nesbit Associates
Audio: Graywolf Press
S a r ah M a n guso
In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay as she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for
twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything
that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies
a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something
important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words,
had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice.
Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two
Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.
Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to
the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes
around and over and through us.
“Bold, elegant, and honest. . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s
testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.”
—The Paris Review
“Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to
life. . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
“Beautiful. . . . Powerful and provocative.”—The Boston Globe
“Like Didion’s memorable ‘On Keeping a Notebook,’ [Ongoingness]
is not a personal record but rather a meditation on the act of recording.”
—Bookforum
© Andy Ryan
www.graywolfpress.org
g r ay wO l f p r E S S
hor of the book-length essays The
nd, most recently, 300 Arguments;
o poetry collections. She lives in
O n g O i n g n E S S : T h E E n D O f a D i a ry
and had a child, and these two
come amnesia that she explores
ingness is a haunting account of
we struggle to find clarity in the
over and through us.
ManguSO
/ $19.50 can
ontinues to define the contours
onfronts a meticulous diary that
“I wanted to end each day with
er happened,” she explains. But
hat she might forget something.
undred thousand words, became
“Fascinating. . . . Fragments that together explore the problem not just of
memory but also identity.”
—Los Angeles Times

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A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms
from one of our greatest essayists
300 Arguments
S a r ah M a n guso
A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah
Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work
is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary
psychological and spiritual insight.
300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of
David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement
that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition,
relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they
add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.
There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your
300
ARGU MENTS
SARAH
MANGUSO
“ [MANGUSO’S] PROSE FEELS TWICE DISTILLED; IT’S WHISKEY
RATHER THAN BEER.”—LESLIE JAMISON, THE ATLANTIC
Nonfiction, 104 pages, 4¾ x 6½
Paperback, $14.00
February
978-1-55597-764-1
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.:
Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Audio: Graywolf Press
grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you.
Bad art is from no one to no one.
Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell
you whether you are.
Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I
notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret
gratitude.
I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll
escape the worst of it.
SARAH MANGUSO is the
—from “300 Arguments”
Praise for Sarah Manguso
“I can’t think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so
rigorously uncompromising.”
—Miranda July
“Manguso covers vast territory with immense subtlety and enviable wit.”
—Jenny Offill
author of three book-length
essays, Ongoingness, The
Guardians, and The Two Kinds
of Decay; a story collection;
and two poetry collections.
She lives in the San Francisco
Bay Area, where she teaches
at St. Mary’s College.

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The
Impossible
Fairy
Tale
A Novel
HAN YUJOO
Tr a n s l a t e d f r o m t h e K o r e a n b y J a n e t H o n g
Fiction, 192 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
March
978-1-55597-766-5
Ebook Available
Brit.: Tilted Axis Press
1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., dram.: Asia Literary Agency
HAN YUJOO was born
in Seoul in 1982. She is
a translator of Michael
Ondaatje and Geoff Dyer,
among ­others, and teaches
at the Seoul Institute of the
Arts and Korea University’s
department of creative writing. This is her first novel.
A chilling, wildly original novel from a
major new voice from South Korea
T h e I m p o s s i b l e F a i r y Ta l e
A Novel
H a n Yujoo
T r a n slated f r om the K o r ea n b y J a n et H o n g
The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school
girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains,
her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported colored pencils and
won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is ­neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she
seems not even to merit a name.
At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky,
seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible,
and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and
soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks.
This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that
end in horrible violence.
But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who
is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives
at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the
events of the novel’s first half, which took place years before. The Impossible
Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making
and of the stinging consequences of neglect.
Praise for Han Yujoo
“Few Korean literary writers since the turn of the century rival Han Yujoo
in her deep awareness of writing.”
—The List

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An astounding work of doubles by
Albert Goldbarth, “a dazzling virtuoso who can
break your heart” (Joyce Carol Oates)
TWO FRONT COVERS—BACK-TO-BACK FORMAT
The Adventures of Form
and Content
Essays
A lbe r t G oldba r th
Albert Goldbarth’s first book of essays in a decade, The Adventures of Form
and Content takes its shape from the ACE Doubles format of the 1950s: turn
this book one way, and read about the checkered history of those sci-fi and
pulp fictions, or about the erotic poetry of Catullus and the gravelly songs
of Springsteen, or about the high gods and the low-down blues, a city of the
holy and of the sinful; turn this book the other way, and read about prehistoric cave artists and NASA astronauts, or about illness and health, or
about the discovery of planets and the discovery of oneself inside an essay,
or about soul ships and space ships, the dead and the living; or turn the
book any way you want, and this book becomes an adventure of author and
reader, form and content.
“Long before any resurgence of the essay’s popularity, there was Albert
Goldbarth: the steadfastly unpredictable master of some of the best essays
in contemporary literature, experiments in force and feeling that magically
bring together Goldbarth’s stratospheric erudition, kaleidoscopic imagination, and his woundingly beautiful sense of humanity. And now here he is
with a new collection, The Adventures of Form and Content, which might actually be his best.”
—John D’Agata
“Everyone knows that Albert Goldbarth is the master of the mix: where
else but in a Goldbarth essay are you going to get the ancient Mesopotamian
epic Enuma Elish mashed up against a pulpy novel? . . . Get off your screen
and buy this newest and best book from the O.G. of the age of the essay.”
—Ander Monson
Nonfiction, 224 pages, 5½ x 8 ¼
Paperback, $16.00
January
978-1-55597-761-0
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
ALBERT GOLDBARTH
has twice won the National
Book Critics Circle Award
in Poetry. He is the author of
five previous collections of
essays, including Many Circles:
New and Selected Essays. He
lives in Wichita, Kansas.

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Now in paperback, a major career retrospective by
the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia
99 Poems
New & Selected
DAnA GIOIA
Poetry, 208 pages, 5½ x 9
Paperback, $18.00
April
978-1-55597-771-9
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
ALSO AVAILABLE
Can Poetry Matter?, Literary
Criticism, Paperback
(978-1-55597-370-4), $16.00
Interrogations at Noon, Poetry,
Paperback (978-1-55597-318-6),
$16.00
Disappearing Ink, Literary Criticism,
Paperback (978-1-55597-410-7),
$16.00
Pity the Beautiful, Poetry, Paperback
(978-1-55597-613-2), $16.00
DANA GIOIA is an
award-winning poet,
critic, and librettist. From
2003 to 2009, he served as
Chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts,
and he currently lectures at
the University of Southern
California.
Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence
and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems:
New & Selected gathers for the fi rst time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection
chronologically, but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections:
mystery, place, remembrance, imagination, stories, songs, and love.
The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations,
and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.
So much of what we live goes on inside—
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
—from “Unsaid”
“No matter what the topic—mystery, place remembrance, imagination,
stories, songs, love—or the form, these polished pieces are vibrant and
inviting.”
—The Washington Post
“Virtually [every poem] here resounds, like the work of another elegantly
musical poet whose corpus bulks little larger than Gioia’s—A. E. Housman.”
—Booklist
“A gifted poet of rhythm and reason, Gioia’s civic and critical pedigree is
impressive. . . . This new and selected collection marks his return to verse.”
—The Millions
“Readers searching for classically styled poetry that is unfl inchingly sincere
and honest will fi nd what they need in the voice of this master poet.”
—Publishers Weekly

GWWinter17cat1-16.indd 14
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r E C E n T
B A C K L I S T
Blackacre
The
N e e d l e ’s
Poems
M O n I C A yO U n
eye
Poetry, 88 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-750-4), $16.00
Ebook Available
P a s s i n g T h r o u g h yo u t h
FaNNy
howe
The needle’s Eye
Passing through Youth
FAnny HOWE
nonfiction, 144 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-756-6), $16.00
Ebook Available
By the author of secoNd childhood, a finalist for the National Book award
“Boggs’s mind is nimble and surprising, her voice penetrating
and humble, her insights keen and striated. Her definition of family
is full of possibility and permutation, and there is an empathetic
force to her work that’s absolutely thrilling.”
—L E S L I E J A M I S O N
the
ART
of
WAITING
on fertility, medicine,
and motherhood
All That Man Is
Sleeping on Jupiter
A Novel
A Novel
D AV I D S z A L Ay
A n U r A D H A rOy
Fiction, 368 pages, Hardcover
(978-1-55597-753-5), $26.00
Ebook Available
Fiction, 272 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-751-1), $16.00
Ebook Available
The Art of Waiting
Cabo de Gata
On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood
A Novel
BELLE BOGGS
EUGEn rUGE
T r A n S L AT E D F r O M T H E G E r M A n
By AnTHE A BELL
nonfiction, 256 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-749-8), $16.00
Ebook Available
Fiction, 120 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-757-3), $14.00
Ebook Available
belle boggs
BENJAMYIN
PERC
“THRILL ME
practices what it
preaches—it’s a craft
book that is also a
thrilling read.”
—KAREN RUSSELL
THessaRysIonLLfictioMn E
roy jacobsen
“A gifted writer, stylish, laconic, and imaginative.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
Thrill Me
The Pinch
Essays on Fiction
A Novel
BEnJAMIn PErCy
STEVE STErn
nonfiction, 184 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-759-7), $16.00
Ebook Available
Fiction, 360 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-752-8), $16.00
Ebook Available
Borders
There now
A Novel
Poems
rOy J ACO B S E n
there now
a novel
EAMOn GrEnnAn
poems
T r A n S L AT E D F r O M T H E
nOrWEG IAn By DOn BArTLE T T
A n D D O n S H AW
EAMON GRENNAN
Fiction, 288 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-755-9), $16.00
Ebook Available
BESTIARY
POEMS
Donika Kelly
Poetry, 80 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-754-2), $16.00
Ebook Available
Bestiary
Poems
D O n I K A K E L Ly
Poetry, 96 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-758-0), $16.00
Ebook Available

GWWinter17cat1-16.indd 15
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